<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>The New Year by GooseAndGold</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24096787">The New Year</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/GooseAndGold/pseuds/GooseAndGold'>GooseAndGold</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>And Friendship, Gen, Honestly I feel like if Sesshoumaru had 500 more years to mellow out he would turn out pretty chill, and mourning friendships, so this is about that</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 23:20:13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,914</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24096787</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/GooseAndGold/pseuds/GooseAndGold</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Kagome is surprised by a visitor to the Higurashi shrine on New Year's Day.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Higurashi Kagome &amp; Sesshoumaru</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>40</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The New Year</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Guys I haven't watched Inuyasha in years, I'm sorry if this is full of errors.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Kagome shuffles from foot to foot against the January cold.</p><p>“Omedeto gozaimasu.” When she smiles and bows to a visitor, she can hardly feel her cheeks that have been numbed with the cold. She quickly tucks her fingers back inside the sleeves of her kosode once the visitors have passed.</p><p>“Omedeto gozaimasu,” she tells the next guests as they approach. These—a young man and woman, staying close but stiffly polite with each other—make her want to smile. She sees the young woman is holding a little omamori charm to her chest, and Kagome can imagine her grandpa’s pitch to the couple for a charm that promises harmony in relationships for the coming year. She can’t even roll her eyes, since the woman’s clinging to it so dearly.</p><p>While her grandpa is selling omamori and receiving the old charms from the last year, and her mom and Souta are at their little food booth, Kagome is watching over the money offerings and helping guests who buy omikuji fortunes from her.</p><p>The shrine isn’t popular except with locals who’ve lived in the area forever. It’s more people her grandpa’s age who were brought here by their grandparents when they were kids. But it’s nice to see people close to her own age coming to make their offerings.</p><p>And so strange, still, for Kagome to watch the lightly falling snow dusting the rooftops of the shrine and blocking out the ambient Tokyo noise, and to think that she’s carrying on something from back then.</p><p>Snow crunches, and she turns to greet her next visitor with as warm a smile as she can. “Omedeto go—” Her heart stops in her chest. “What…” she breathes.</p><p>It’s Sesshoumaru in front of her. Isn’t it?</p><p>Long silver hair, open and flowing well past his waist. Tall. Cold eyes. Fair skin.</p><p>“Miko,” he says, and she breathes. Yes, it’s Sesshoumaru.</p><p>She’s too stunned to wonder where she left her bow, or to think about how she would never be able to fetch it in time, if he decided to kill her.</p><p>“What are you doing here?” It’s him who asks the question that’s on the tip of her tongue. Her brain stutters a bit.</p><p>“Wha…I <em>live </em>here. What are <em>you</em> doing here?” Then she claps her hands over her mouth. <em>Rude!</em></p><p>The daiyoukai doesn’t answer her immediately. He steps forward, eyeing her outfit and her face harshly. Then, bizarrely, his gaze slides away and behind her. She turns, following his eyes, to find Inuyasha’s tree behind her. “You have not changed since I last saw you. How is that possible?”</p><p>That’s right.</p><p>He doesn’t know anything about her.</p><p>“Sesshoumaru-sama, I <em>live</em> here. I was born in this era.”</p><p>“You live at the Higurashi Shrine,” he repeats, flatly.</p><p>“My name is Higurashi Kagome,” she explains.</p><p>Again his eyes wander over to the tree, but he doesn’t reply.</p><p>She takes the moment to look him over, now that her brain is starting to catch up. He’s wearing a kimono—without hakama over top—which gives him a formal appearance that is way out of place with the time period. She hasn’t seen a man in a kimono at all this year, outside of ceremonies. The white silk with plum blossoms would appear feminine, without a plain haori jacket over top.</p><p>Kagome realizes something suddenly, and glances around. “Did you come here alone? Wait, how did you <em>get </em>here?” Suddenly, she’s almost overcome with the urge to run to the well, and check if it’s opened. If it would let her through.</p><p>“I came by car.”</p><p>Car? He <em>drove</em> to her time period? Car? By car…</p><p>“Miko,” he interrupts her thoughts, taking a single step closer. “Do you understand that I did not travel here from the past? I have lived in Kyoto almost one hundred years. I came to Tokyo only to observe Oshogatsu.”</p><p>“Oh god,” she says, and buries her face in her hands. Sesshoumaru is a <em>demon</em>. Of course he could live this long. He was hundreds of years old in Inuyasha’s time. What difference would a few hundred more years make? “I’m such an idiot,” she mumbles into her own palms.</p><p>Sesshoumaru, thankfully, doesn’t add anything to that—she’s not sure she could take it right now if he had something cutting to say.</p><p>“You’ve been alive this whole time.” It’s her turn to glance back at Inuyasha’s tree. The tree, the shrine, the miko training she threw herself into even before she’d graduated. She thought these were the only things connecting her to the past. The only things that she could hold onto to remind herself that it was real. But someone from the Warring States Period has been alive and breathing, walking around Kyoto. She could get to Kyoto by shinkansen in under three hours. She <em>has</em> been to Kyoto by shinkansen, on a school trip, back when she was thirteen. Was he there, back when she was walking around with her classmates, getting bored by having to tour different shrines when she was so used to living in one? Before she ever met him in the past, she could have encountered him in the future?</p><p>“Souta!” She shouts across the yard, turning the heads of some of the visitors to the shrine, but she doesn’t care. Her brother’s head pops out from the side of the canvas booth where he’s been helping her mom sell treats. His irritated expression melts to shock when he takes in the sight of Sesshoumaru standing next to her, and he whips the apron off and runs over to her, even though his eyes never leave the daiyoukai.</p><p>“Someone you know from the past, nee-san?” He asks. There’s a lot unspoken in his tone.</p><p>She nods and smiles for him, trying to put him at ease. “Right. An acquaintance. Can you cover me for a bit?”</p><p>She hardly stays long enough for Souta to agree, moving toward the house. “Sesshoumaru-sama, please come with me,” she beckons. He follows her without arguing, which puts her a little off balance, but she can’t complain.</p><p>She leads him across the grounds toward their house, taking a longer way instead of cutting across the lawn, thanks to the slowly-accumulating snow.</p><p>Up the front steps and into the house, Kagome kicks off her sandals and turns to find that Sesshoumaru has already done the same, ghosting in behind her.</p><p>He closes the door behind them with his hand—still his only hand, she notes belatedly—and turns an expectant eye to her.</p><p>“Right. Well. Welcome. Uh, do you want any tea?”</p><p>“Thank you for your hospitality,” he replies, and nods for them both to continue into the house.</p><p>It’s weird.</p><p>She gets him seated at the kotatsu and heads into the kitchen to fill the kettle. She sets it to beep when it’s done boiling and pads back into the living room.</p><p>Her guest has folded himself down at the table with his long hair settled in a pool around him, and as she enters the room he’s looking at a photo of her family, framed on top of the bookshelf. Her grandfather in his shrine clothes, looking stern and stoic. Souta a foot shorter than he is now, with their mom’s hands on his shoulder behind him. Kagome in her high school uniform, and Inyasha with his arms crossed and his ears barely hidden under his baseball cap.</p><p>She doesn’t want to interrupt him, so Kagome stands in the doorway with her arms wrapped anxiously around her waist.</p><p>“My brother came to this time, somehow.” He turns his eyes away from the picture, slowly, as though it’s hard for him to stop looking. “By what means were you able to travel to the past?”</p><p>“There’s a well, on the shrine property. The Bone Eater’s well. It was a link to the past, before.” She hears a beep from the kitchen, then. “Sorry, Sesshoumaru-sama. That’s the kettle. Give me a second to pour the tea.”</p><p>She hurries back into the kitchen and chooses her family’s nicest cups, and holds them up to the light to make sure there isn’t a single speck of food gunk on them. She pours the tea into the matching teapot and sets everything onto a lacquered tray and focuses every ounce of her attention on not dropping anything or tripping on her hakama as she shuffles back to the living room.</p><p>As she sets the tray down, he says “The Bone Eater’s well.” Straight to business, then.</p><p>“That’s right.” She sits herself down at the other side of the kotatsu. Since he hasn’t put his feet under the table, she helps herself, and almost sighs with relief as the built-in heater starts warming her toes under the blanket. She pours his tea, and then her own, and wraps her still-numb fingers around the porcelain contentedly.</p><p>“The well was connected to your time, somehow.” Or, not his time, is it? “Or, sorry. To the Warring States Period.” She tells him about the shikon no tama, buried in her chest, and her connection to Kikyo, and how she traveled back and forth through time until the jewel was restored and purified.</p><p>The whole time, Sesshoumaru watches with eyes narrowed in sharp concentration, and does not move. Does not ask questions. Just lets her keep talking, and talking.</p><p>It is incredibly weird.</p><p>“I see,” he says softly once she’s finished. He takes the first sip of his tea, finally, and then sits for a long moment in silence. “How odd to think that for years, there was a portal through time a negligible distance from me, and I knew nothing of it.”</p><p>She was travelling back to the past, and this whole time, there was a version of Sesshoumaru here in the present just…living his life.</p><p>This is <em>unbearably</em> weird.</p><p>“Would you go back, if you knew?” Kagome realizes, once the question has left her mouth, that she doesn’t know anything about Sesshoumaru now. Probably even less than he knows about her. If he went back, what would he use the opportunity for? From the way he looked at Inuyasha’s tree, his photograph—from the way he’s sitting on her living room floor with a cup of tea cradled in his single hand—she doesn’t think he would do something malicious.</p><p>“I cannot know for certain, now that the opportunity is gone.”</p><p>Kagome blinks. Really? He has more connection to the past than she does—it’s his past—but she knows that she would go. “There’s nothing you miss that you would want to see again?”</p><p>“There is,” he confirms. “So it would be unwise to go.”</p><p>Oh. She looks over at the photo. At Inuyasha’s face. She wishes she’d gotten more pictures of him. Of everyone. She wishes she’d filled an album with polaroids from the past. But she didn’t. So she has the shrine to remember them by.</p><p>“How have you been, Sesshoumaru-sama?”</p><p>He blinks, clearly surprised, and she smiles just a little. “I am well,” he says finally.</p><p>“I’m glad,” she tells him, and it’s sincere. He was their enemy for a long time—a deadly threat—but he was also an ally, in the end.</p><p>“And you?” It’s her turn to be surprised.</p><p>“I’m good. I’ve been good. After the shikon no tama was destroyed, I’ve been focused on miko training. Everything that happened in the past made me realize how important it was. You know?”</p><p>“I do,” he confirms simply.</p><p>“And…what about you? You said you live in Kyoto?” And drove here. In a <em>car</em>. Sesshoumaru, daiyoukai lord of the Western Lands. She suddenly has a powerful need to know what kind of car he would drive.</p><p>He dips his head in a nod, and takes another sip of tea.</p><p>“What do you…I mean, do you work? Are there other demons in Kyoto?”</p><p>He pauses here, a bit. “I do work. I tend a private shrine.”</p><p>Kagome’s tea hits her knees, as her cup slips through her fingers and clatters down to the floor. “Ow! Shoot,” she scrambles to her feet and runs to the kitchen again, shouting an apology over her shoulder as she goes.</p><p>She comes sliding back in, tabi socks skidding on the hardwood, and drops to her knees to mop up the spill before it can warp the floor. “Sorry,” she says again while she scrubs at the floor.</p><p>When Kagome looks up, Sesshoumaru has shifted at some point to sit up, as if he’d started standing.</p><p>“Sesshoumaru-sama, I’m sorry. This is really hard for me to come to grips with.”</p><p>He reaches across the table and takes the cloth from her hand, fingers deft but firm, and sets it aside on the table. “As I understand your story, it has been three years for you since our last encounter. For me, some five hundred years have passed.”</p><p>“Right.” She nods.</p><p>“Anything I tell you of the changes that have occurred in those five hundred long years will be a shock.”</p><p>“Right,” Kagome says again. She sighs. “You’re working at a <em>shrine</em>?”</p><p>“The shrine is my property, not my place of employment.”</p><p>Kagome sits back on her heels. “I would have pictured you living in a castle or something. Have you had the shrine since…before?”</p><p>“It was my father’s before me,” Sesshoumaru confirms. “As is the castle at Inuyama.”</p><p>Oh. Right. Obviously. “I’m…wow. Inuyasha never mentioned that. Did he know?”</p><p>“Not at the time when you knew him, no.”</p><p>So he knew afterwards. Sesshoumaru must have told him? “What…happened between you? To everyone? After I left.”</p><p>This, the daiyoukai doesn’t answer. A few years ago, Kagome might have worried that she crossed a line. But this Sesshoumaru doesn’t scare her. Still, that doesn’t mean she’s not worried about how to speak with him. It feels important,<em> really</em> important, to get it right. </p><p>“I’m sorry I asked, you don’t have to answer that. I’m just…”</p><p>“Miko,” he interrupts her. “None you knew have survived to the present day, save myself.”</p><p>She lets out a breath, and it shakes as it leaves her. She brings her hands to her eyes to stop the tears she feels stinging at them.</p><p>“Yeah,” she breathes, when she feels ready to. “That’s what I figured. They all knew where to find me, if they were still around, after all.”</p><p>They sit in mutual silence, then. Kagome feels suddenly, impossibly drained.</p><p>Sesshoumaru looks up, eyes toward the hall, before Kagome hears the doorknob turn and the front door open with a whine.</p><p>“Nee-chan?” Souta calls into the house.</p><p>Kagome wipes her face on her kosode’s sleeve, and clears her throat, glancing at the daiyoukai. His face remains placid. “Yeah, Souta?” she calls back.</p><p>“Mom wanted me to check in on you,” he says. She can hear the unasked question, <em>are you alright, </em>in his voice. It gets her to smile, a bit.</p><p>“Yeah Souta. Just catching up. Call me if you get too busy out there, okay?”</p><p>There’s a long pause before he calls “Okay,” and closes the door.</p><p>When Kagome turns again, Sesshoumaru is uncurling to his feet. She blinks, startled, and stands too.</p><p>“I have imposed on your hospitality long enough, Miko,” he tells her.</p><p>She wants to tell him not to go. She wants to talk to him about the past. Needs to. She wants someone who understands to stay here. With her.</p><p>But there’s nothing she can say as he turns into the hallway. </p><p>“Sesshoumaru. It was really good to see you,” she tells him earnestly.</p><p>He turns at the door, having slipped back into his shoes. “The pleasure was mine, Miko. May fortune allow us to meet again.”</p><p>And then he leaves.</p><p>The door closing casts the hall in shadow again. Kagome makes her way slowly back to the living room, and looks at the two tea cups. The tea pot. The wet rag. The family photo, on the bookshelf.</p><p>She tidies the table and sets everything in the kitchen, to handle later. She has to get back to the shrine, after all. She changes out of her damp hakama and into a fresh pair, and sneaks an extra pair of socks on, under her formal ones.</p><p>Then she heads back, jogging up the stairs and through the torii gate.</p><p>“Nee-san,” Souta says when she reaches the offering box.</p><p>She blinks and looks up, noticing him for the first time. “Sorry, Souta. Did you say something?”</p><p>“I said who was that man? Did you know him from…you know, before?”</p><p>They bow, both of them, and wish an elderly couple a happy New Year as they walk past.</p><p>“Yeah,” she tells him. “Inuyasha’s brother. Sesshoumaru.”</p><p>“<em>What?”</em></p><p>Kagome waves her hand, sheepishly. “Yeah. It was a surprise.”</p><p>“You didn’t invite him to stay for supper?”</p><p>The idea of getting Sesshoumaru seated at her family’s table, with her grandfather grilling the daiyoukai lord about the Warring States period, and her mother pulling her aside to ask if Kagome thinks of him as boyfriend material, has her double over laughing.</p><p>“Nee-san,” Souta says, irritated.</p><p>“Sorry! Whew, sorry,” she tells him. She wipes her tears out of her eyes with her sleeve. “I’m never going to invite him for supper, no,” she laughs.</p><p>When she looks up, Souta is pouting, embarrassed. “Whatever. Well, at least introduce us all next time.”</p><p>Introduce her family to Sesshoumaru. “Fine. If he ever comes back, then I will.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Inuyama is a real castle which is presumably owned by real people. But...not in this fic. I mean, come on.</p></blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>